“What was the most exciting thing you saw?” I ask.

“I found a list of officers’ names,” he claims, “under the heading ‘Non-Terrestrial Officers’.”

“Non-Terrestrial Officers?” I say.

“Yeah, I looked it up,” says Gary, “and it’s nowhere. It doesn’t mean little green men. What I think it means is not earth-based. I found a list of ‘fleet-to-fleet transfers’, and a list of ship names. I looked them up. They weren’t US navy ships. What I saw made me believe they have some kind of spaceship, off-planet.”

“The Americans have a secret spaceship?” I ask.

“That’s what this trickle of evidence has led me to believe.”

“Some kind of other Mir that nobody knows about?”

“I guess so,” says Gary.

“What were the ship names?”

“I can’t remember,” says Gary. “I was smoking a lot of dope at the time. Not good for the intellect.”

The Guardian recently published an interview with Gary McKinnon – a man accused of committing the ‘biggest military computer hack of all time’.

But rather than sneaking into military systems with the intention of blackmail or mischief-making, his curiousity was fuelled, he claims, solely by his belief in the UFO conspiracy theory. He was just looking for evidence, to see whether it was or wasn’t true. He now faces extradition to the US, and up to 70 years in a federal jail.